An Awfully Big Adventure

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Mother said what she always said.

  6

  Two weeks into the new season Rose Lipman, sitting in her office on the first floor, heard a cry pitched like the squeal of a snared rabbit coming from No. 1 dressing-room. It was three minutes to Overtures and Beginners. She was in the middle of writing a report for the monthly meeting of the board of governors but she laid down her pen immediately. She went along the corridor and knocked on Meredith’s door. He was lying under a tartan rug on the sofa.

  ‘That Miss Allenby,’ she said. ‘Seeing you’re keeping her on, I hope you’ve mentioned the cut in salary.’

  ‘But of course. She was grateful for what she could get.’

  ‘And what about the new girl? How’s she shaping up?’

  ‘Very well indeed,’ Meredith said. ‘No complaints at all. Bunny says she’s quite an asset, even if she did have a disturbed schooling.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked Rose, and grimaced; she was wearing new shoes and they were giving her gyp.

  ‘She had a weak chest. She was kept at home a lot.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks,’ Rose said. ‘I know the family. She hasn’t had a day’s illness in her life.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘she’s become quite a favourite with the company.’

  It was true. Dotty Blundell had grown especially fond of Stella. She was of the opinion there was more to the girl than might reasonably be expected. She had a boldness of manner, not to be confused with brashness, and an ability to express herself that was amusing, if at times disconcerting. She said as much to Bunny, who, after being furnished with certain examples of this refreshing trait, decided he ought to look into the matter.

  He waylaid Stella in the paint-frame where she had been sent to boil rabbit glue on the Bunsen burner. He could hear her coughing half-way along the passage. He said, ‘You understand that in my capacity as stage manager it’s my job not only to train you in your chosen career but to guide you in other respects.’

  ‘I didn’t choose it,’ she said. ‘It was thrust upon me by Uncle Vernon.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ he persisted, ‘it’s been brought to my notice that you’ve expressed somewhat vividly your dislike of a certain member of the Company.’

  ‘Have I?’ asked Stella. She looked puzzled.

  ‘Apparently you referred to Mr Fairchild in these terms,’ said Bunny, and dipping a brush in a tin of brown paint he scrawled the word ‘cunt’ on a piece of sugar paper tacked to the work top.

  ‘Is that how you spell it?’ she said.

  ‘You can’t use words like that, and certainly not in public. It’s extremely vulgar. This is a theatre not a barrack room.’

  ‘I was only repeating what George calls him,’ said Stella. ‘Hasn’t it got something to do with horse-racing?’

  Bunny repeated the conversation to Meredith, who laughed.

  ‘Perhaps I ought to take her under my wing,’ he suggested. ‘Attend to her spiritual welfare.’

  These days he was markedly buoyant. Hilary was telephoning him regularly, both at the theatre and the hotel. There was also a treasured, unprecedented letter, which he kept in his wallet and unfolded at least once a day, humbly asking his forgiveness.

  ‘You don’t want to overdo it,’ said Bunny nervously. ‘I’ve told her she must spend less time in the prop room.’

  All the same Meredith began to pay some attention to the girl. He had already cast her as Ptolemy, the boy king, in Caesar and Cleopatra. It was an excellent little cameo, and as most of the dialogue was in the form of a rehearsed speech to the court of Alexandria it would hardly matter if, overcome by nerves, she forgot her lines. It was in the text that the eunuch Pothinus should prompt her. Suitably robed – the designer had already shown him drawings of an onion-shaped headpiece and a collar of gold – she would look more sphinx-like than most, certainly more exotic than Babs Osborne whose voice was pitched a little too high and whose features were a little too Frinton-on-Sea to suggest the perfect Cleopatra.

  Stella seemed unimpressed at being given a role so early in the season. He overheard Geoffrey telling her she was lucky and her reply that luck didn’t come into it. ‘He wouldn’t have asked me if he didn’t think I could do it,’ she had retorted.

  He took to keeping Stella at his side during rehearsals, ostensibly to jot down notes. Her spelling was deplorable and she had a habit of adding comments of her own. John Harbour is all right as Appolodorus, she wrote, but his eyelashes are a destraction, and, How old is Seaser exactly? Should Mr St Ives look so aincent? He enjoyed both her company and the effect he had on her. At night in the lounge of the Commercial Hotel he and Bunny read her notes aloud to one another.

  Stella had believed herself in love with him. Now, when he allowed her so much of his time, she realised that what she had felt before was but a poor shade of the real thing. The very mention of his name caused her to tremble, and in his company she had the curious sensation that her feet and her nose had enlarged out of all proportion. When he spoke to her she could scarcely hear what he said for the thudding of her lovesick heart and the chattering of her teeth. Often he told her she ought to wear warmer clothing.

  Once, in the lunch hour, he invited her to accompany Bunny and himself to church. She was worried lest Uncle Vernon or Lily might see her going into Philip Neri’s and was relieved when they went instead to St Peter’s in Seel Street. She copied the way Meredith bent his knee as he passed in front of the altar, and when he said November was dedicated to the souls in purgatory she lit a candle for the commercial traveller with the skin grafts.

  On leaving, Meredith dipped his hand into a basin of water and traced a cross on her forehead. The touch of his fingers gave her such pleasure, that, scowling, she coughed all the way back to the theatre.

  Endeavouring to be what she imagined was his ideal, she altered her demeanour several times a day. He had only to say he admired Grace Bird’s fortitude and instantly her chin stiffened with resolve. He had but to comment favourably on the kittenish qualities of Babs Osborne for her to curl up as best she could on the plush seat beside him, her thumb in her mouth. Twenty-four hours later he admonished Babs for over-stressing the little-girl aspect of Cleopatra, pointing out that childishness of character was not a question of years and that she was mistaken if she supposed the difference between folly and wisdom had anything to do with either age or youth. He was not generally in favour of such a cerebral course, but in her case he felt she might gain from taking a more philosophical approach to the part. Then Stella, perceptive of his tone if not altogether sure of his argument, abandoned her thumb-sucking.

  He talked to her about the play, the characters. On the surface Caesar appeared to be a supremely selfish individual, but then she had to take into account that having virtue he had no need of goodness. He was neither forgiving nor generous because the heroic figure, the truly great man, having nothing to resent could have nothing to forgive. The distinction between virtue and goodness was not understood in modern times. As for Cleopatra, she was an uneducated girl and deluded if she thought Caesar gave a pig’s bonnet for her. It was Anthony whom she had enslaved, never Caesar. To Caesar all women were the same. There was always another one around the next pyramid.

  This upset Stella, though she knew she was being foolish. After all Meredith was not alluding to her, any more than he was casting himself in the role of Caesar. From now on, she thought, I shall strive to be virtuous.

  Geoffrey was peeved she spent so much time in Meredith’s company. It smacked of favouritism. He was playing a Nubian slave, a centurion and a sentinel in the forthcoming production, each of whom were required to utter such lines as ‘The sacred white cat has been stolen’ and ‘Woe! Alas! Fly, fly!’ It was a start, but not to be compared with Stella’s debut as Ptolemy. He was even more irritated when Bunny told her she was to be interviewed by a reporter from the Manchester Daily News.

  ‘Why me?’ she asked, voicing Geoffrey’s own though
t.

  ‘It’s “the local girl makes good” angle,’ explained Bunny.

  The reporter would be at the stage door shortly after three o’clock. Stella must remember that she carried a heavy responsibility for the good name of the theatre. She should deal with his questions truthfully, but if he asked her anything of a personal nature she must decline to answer. The best way of coping with that sort of thing was to state firmly but courteously that she wasn’t prepared to comment.

  ‘I don’t mind being personal,’ she said. ‘I don’t think anything else is all that interesting.’

  ‘I mean gossip,’ he warned. ‘Don’t let him lead you into discussing other members of the company.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ observed Geoffrey darkly, ‘too much publicity can have an adverse effect on both career and character.’

  ‘Give me an example?’ Stella demanded.

  ‘T.E. Lawrence,’ he replied, though not without a struggle.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ she said, and shrugged her shoulders dismissively.

  The man from the newspaper wore a black trilby hat and a long black overcoat. He was bothered about his weight. ‘Ignore the barrage balloon,’ he joked, flattening himself exaggeratedly against the wall as the actors came out of the pass door and went up to their rooms. ‘That’s never Richard St Ives?’ he exclaimed, watching an elderly man in a peaked cap stumbling on the stairs. ‘Surely he’s heavier than that?’

  ‘It’s Mr Cartwright,’ said Stella. ‘He’s from a dramatic society on the Wirral. He plays Brittanicus. It’s a big cast, you see. Twenty students from the University are coming in as extras.’

  They walked to the snack-bar of the news-theatre in Clayton Square. It was Stella’s suggestion; she thought the lady behind the tea-urn would be impressed when the reporter took out his pencil.

  ‘I was a slip of a lad when the war started,’ he lamented. ‘Two years in the air force and I blew up.’ He hoisted himself onto a high stool and wedged his stout thighs beneath the rail of the counter.

  ‘I expect you want to ask me how I began in the theatre,’ Stella said. Anxious to give credit where credit was due, she added, ‘I was trained by Mrs Ackerley at Crane Hall. I got a gold medal when I was twelve.’

  ‘It was all that Naafi food,’ the reporter complained. ‘Those boiled potatoes.’

  ‘She plumped out my vowels. I tend to have flat ones. It’s to do with catarrh as much as region.’

  ‘It was all that stodge,’ he persisted. ‘I developed a taste for it.’

  For a man who despaired of his appetite he was surprisingly offhand with the buck rarebit he had ordered; he did no more than shove it round and round his plate. Every so often he took a square-shaped flask from the inside pocket of his coat and stuck it to his lips like a trumpet. ‘I need starch,’ he said, gurgling.

  ‘It’s never as simple as that, is it?’ said Stella. ‘I expect you’re unhappy.’

  ‘I am, my dear,’ he admitted. ‘How very acute of you. It’s my home life, you see.’ And he removed his hat and discussed for some minutes the shortcomings of his wife Rita who had been in the land-army when they met. He had first caught sight of her riding in a ploughed field beyond the barbed wire perimeter of the air base. With hindsight it would have saved a lot of heartbreak if he had looked the other way. She had been perched on the seat of a tractor with the gulls flowing behind her in a slip-stream.

  ‘She looked very jaunty,’ he said. ‘Monarch of all she surveyed . . . Tess of the D’Urbervilles . . . that sort of thing. But I don’t mind confessing that after a few honeymoon months we stalled more times than we took off . . . if you take my meaning.’

  Stella didn’t; she nodded just the same. ‘I suppose that’s why you’re so fat,’ she said. ‘You put on bulk to withstand the pressures.’

  He gave her an unhappy smile and excused himself, flopping off his stool and lumbering towards the gents. ‘I’m being interviewed,’ Stella told the tea-lady. ‘I’m at the Playhouse. I play a boy-king, son of the flute-blower.’

  ‘It’s all right for some,’ the tea-lady said.’ And she picked up the plate of spurned buck rarebit and emptied it into the bin under the counter.

  Outside the window the day was already darkening. Across the square a gush of steam billowed from the kitchen vent of Reece’s Restaurant and swallowed the sparks of a shuddering tram.

  The reporter returned with two tickets for the news-theatre. He said he’d expire if he had to sit on that high stool much longer. They sat in the back row and watched a newsreel of Jack Gardiner punching Bruce Woodcock into a corner, followed by a cartoon. The reporter squirmed in his seat, and then seizing Stella’s hand placed it on his lap and held it there, gripping her by the wrist. She was astonished and sat as though turned to stone, her fingers thrust through the opening of his unbuttoned trousers. On the flickering screen the wicked wolf tried his best to blow down the house of the three little pigs. The reporter covered Stella’s hand with his hat.

  She examined her conscience to discover if she was in any way to blame for her companion’s curious behaviour. Every evening when she called ‘Overture’ and ‘Beginners’ Richard St Ives dragged her through the doorway and, putting her across his knee, whacked her on the bottom with a rolled-up copy of The Stage. And only last night, Desmond Fairchild, hearing her shouting the minutes in the passage, had come out of the lavatory still holding himself. Neither occurrence was as rude as what the reporter was doing, but she was pretty sure the intention was the same. It was only a matter of degree. Did this sort of thing happen to Babs Osborne or Miss Blundell?

  She tried to pull her hand free, but it was held fast. The protuberance under her fingers felt soft and hard at the same time, an iron fist in a velvet glove. Attempting to bring what Meredith would call a philosophical approach to her predicament, she pondered on the differences in men’s and women’s clothing. Trousers, she now realised, were so designed not because their wearers had funny legs but because men were constantly worried that an essential part of themselves might have gone missing. They wanted instant access, just to make sure things were in place. What was more puzzling was why they needed everyone else to check as well.

  The reporter removed his hat and shoved a handkerchief at her. She wondered whether she had been sniffing; it was true she had the beginnings of a cold. Suddenly he let out a huge sigh, as though the air was being forced out of him. He seemed to grow smaller; certainly his thingumajig shrank. Almost at once he fell into a doze. She was left holding a jelly baby of shrivelled skin, her fingers glued together, webbed by a sticky emission.

  Presently she slid her hand away and wiped it furtively on the upholstery of the seat beside her. Cuckoo spit, she thought, watching a working man emerging from a mining cage with an inappropriate smile on his blackened face.

  The reporter woke and got abruptly to his feet, jamming his hat on his head. In the square the flower-sellers had lit the naphtha flares in the buckets set along the cobblestones. The windows of Owen Owens blazed with light. It was gone half past five.

  ‘I have a complimentary ticket for Dangerous Corner,’ the reporter said in a business-like way. ‘Perhaps we could meet afterwards. There are one or two questions we never got round to.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ she said. She didn’t think he would use the ticket, any more than he would wait for her after the performance. He was already worried lest she should tell someone what had happened. If she really wanted she could get him sent to prison. All his cockiness had deserted him; under the street lamp his face was old and frightened.

  She wished him goodnight and he raised that shameful hat as she turned and walked away towards the theatre, rubbing her hand against her hip-bone like a soiled cloth against a scrubbing board.

  Bunny asked how the interview had gone and she said it had gone very well. She didn’t think anything of a personal nature had entered the conversation. After the first interval she took Freddie Reynalde’s coffee and biscuits down
to the band room under the stage. Mr Reynalde played the piano in the intermissions and could remember a time before the war when there was a proper orchestra in the pit. Things, he often told Stella, weren’t the same, and neither was he. Because of his principles he hadn’t served in the Forces and they’d made him do labouring jobs instead, so that now his hands weren’t what they used to be either.

  On the table he kept a photograph, ringed with the imprint of coffee cups, of a man sitting sideways on a motor bike. Across one corner was written in ink ‘To Freddie, affectionately O’Hara’. Every time she saw the photograph Stella was reminded of someone, but she could never catch who it was. In profile the man appeared haughty, contemptuous almost. She had the feeling that if she could only get him to turn and look at her she’d recognise him. She was going out of the band room when she suddenly asked, ‘If someone takes liberties with you, is it partly your own fault?’

  ‘Liberties?’ Freddie said. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  She found she couldn’t tell him after all. ‘I keep getting put over someone’s knee and smacked.’

  ‘St Ives,’ said Reynalde. ‘He’s harmless. If you don’t like it tell him so, or else stay out of his reach.’

  ‘It’s not that I either like or dislike it,’ said Stella, ‘I just don’t see what good it does.’

  After the curtain had come down and she’d put away the props she hid in the extra’s dressing-room in case the reporter had changed his mind and dared to wait for her. Her wrist hurt. When she held it up to the light she saw that a small circle of skin was inflamed. She hoped she hadn’t caught an unmentionable disease from her visit to the news-theatre. Half an hour later, descending the stairs, she was startled to hear voices coming from the first floor. She had thought everyone would have gone to the Oyster Bar and that only the night-watchman would be in the building. She stopped and listened, and heard first laughter and then a voice shouting, ‘For God’s sake.’ The next moment a door was flung violently open.